The knowledge about affix plays a vital role in the development of word knowledge and vocabulary acquisition. A test for diagnostic information on the level of affix knowledge would be useful in order to inform the test users of what learners have gained or lacked in this integral component of vocabulary knowledge. This paper reports the…

The use of four-skills language exams to support the achievement of curriculum goals in Japan is an under-researched yet critical topic. This study focuses on washback from the Cambridge B1 Preliminary and B2 First exams, which were used as fixed-point tests at a senior high school. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, utilizing data from…

Background: The assessment of cross-curricular skills is gaining attention in many countries. In Japan, the 'Information Literacy Survey for Upper Secondary Students' (the ILSUS) was designed to measure information literacy through Computer-Based Testing (CBT). It was the first large-scale survey based on Item Response Theory (IRT) implemented by…

VocQGen is an automated tool designed to generate multiple-choice cloze (MCC) questions for vocabulary assessment in second language learning contexts. It leverages several natural language processing (NLP) tools and OpenAI's GPT-4 model to produce MCC items quickly from user-specified word lists. To evaluate its effectiveness, we used the first…

Email remains a key mode of communication between faculty and students in higher education institutions. Composing appropriate email texts is an important skill for learners; however, little technological support is available for the pragmatic aspect of email communication -- the ways in which social context influences language choices.…

The study evaluated a recently postponed national test policy on the use of external agencies' English tests measuring four skills for Japanese university admission purposes. Using Kunnan's principles of fairness and justice, we generated and evaluated three claims regarding the test policy: vocabulary coverage of the tests, the justifiability of…

Background: The use of computers has increased in speaking assessments; however, there are concerns about how the absence of an interlocutor affects performance on speaking tests. Method: In the current study, the test scores and the underlying factor structures of monologic tasks were compared between two delivery modes: computer delivery and…

This paper reports on the implementation of Japanese extensive reading with international students studying at a Japanese university using graded readers (GRs). GRs chosen for the present study were simplified versions of original Japanese literature and were used to support students in acquiring a top-down reading strategy, a wide range of…

Taking commercial English language tests is becoming common practice among young English learners in Japan. With a specific focus on the "Jido Eiken" test, this study examines English language test-taking activity by analyzing textual data retrieved from three data sources. "Jido Eiken" is found to represent a complex…

In the twenty-first century, the use of standardized tests as the primary means to evaluate schools and teachers in the United States has contributed to severe dilemmas, including misleading information on what students know, lower-level instruction, cheating, less collaboration, unfair treatment of teachers, and biased teaching. This article…

The ultimate aim of our research project was to use the Google Web Speech API to automate scoring of elicited imitation (EI) tests. However, in order to achieve this goal, we had to take a number of preparatory steps. We needed to assess how accurate this speech recognition tool is in recognizing native speakers' production of the test items; we…

Simultaneous with a call for standardized assessments to assess developing rather than preexisting or surface knowledge (Sawyer, 2006) has been a growth in awareness of the unavoidable interactive nature of any form of assessment and this awareness has created a social turn towards approaches to language assessment (McNamara & Roever, 2006).…

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a year-long reading while listening (RWL) program run for university first-year students at a private university in Japan. The program was developed to give students practice in listening to a large volume of spoken English--a practice that the majority of Japanese students lack. The…

The aim of the 2018 International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) conference was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There have been advances in both cognitive…

The aim of this study is to optimize CALL environments as a learning tool rather than a gloss, focusing on the learning of polysemous words which refer to spatial relationship between objects. A lot of research has already been conducted to examine the efficacy of visual glosses while reading L2 texts and has reported that visual glosses can be…